You guys know what’s rad? Grassroots, DIY racing. You know what else is rad? Weird French cars. What do you get when you mix the two together with a big ol’ dash of early-70s Continental cool? You get this, an insanely rad documentary about Citroën rallycross called Pop Cross.
Filmed in July of 1972, Pop Cross is a short feature about a Citroën Cross race in Argenton-sur-Creuse, a commune in central France. So, what’s Citroën Cross? Good question! Info seems a little thin on the ground, but from what I can tell, Citroën Cross was a kind of grassroots rallycross racing that was popular in Europe in the ’70s and ’80s. The cars were mostly stripped-down but otherwise stock Citroën 2CVs and Dyanes, and the whole thing has real powerful Folk Race or even early 24-Hours of Lemons energy.
The video itself is a solid 12 minutes of old-school racing goodness. It’s a feast for the eyes and ears featuring a killer soundtrack, amazing early-70s styles, and lots of close-quarters racing and frantic wrenching. Look real close and you’ll see that both men and women are racing here, and the crowd of spectators are a mix of families and party animals. If you could smell this video, it’d smell like Gauloises, cheap wine, dirt, and gasoline—my kinda party. It’s a great little time capsule, a look back at a weird kind of cheap local racing that, despite all odds, seems to still be going strong.
The Citroën 2CV
You didn’t think I was going to let you go without a history lesson, did you? ‘Cause I’m not. Before you go, I’m going to tell you a little bit about my close personal friend, the The Citroën 2CV
Known colloquially as the Duck, the Tin Snail, and the Deux Chevaux (two horses), the quirky and iconic 2CV was first designed in the 1930s as a kind of French people’s car—a way to get farmers off of horses and into motor vehicles. In fact, rumor has it that one of the main design requirements of the car’s weird, soft, shockingly competent suspension was that the car needed to be able to drive over a freshly plowed field with a basket of eggs on the seat without breaking any of those eggs. Look, a man’s got to have his priorities, okay?
Anyway, the outbreak of WWII put a stop to 2CV construction, but it popped up again in postwar France and turned out to be exactly what the beleaguered, war-weary nation needed in a car. It was a masterpiece of minimalist design—cheap, simple, functional, and you could fix it with a hammer in the event that it needed fixing (which wasn’t that often). Think of it as the French equivalent of a Volkswagen Beetle, with the same sort of cult following.
2CVs were produced for 42 years with very little in the way of upgrades or changes. Over the years, the engines ranged from 375ccs to 602ccs—all of them air-cooled boxers mated to four-speed gearboxes. They weren’t fast, and their looks were an acquired taste, but people loved them. In fact, Citroën tried multiple times to replace the 2CV with models like the Dyan, Visa, and AX, but it never took. People loved that weird little utilitarian people mover, and it took the full weight of modern market forces and tightening regulations to finally kill it. The last Deux Chevaux rolled off a Portuguese production line on July 27, 1990.
